Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Difficult POV

The final clashes in "The Granite Strand" are an interesting mix. The party splits into three operational units and each has their action happening at the same time as all the others. In that way, it's sort of like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. One of the POV characters is not human and has amazing powers of accurate perception. This provides some POV challenges to the writer. The character can see, hear, feel, and sense all kinds of things at once, process those inputs, and rapidly come to a decision much faster than a human can. The trick is how to write it. If I list everything that he's able to do, the pages would go on and on while describing only a few seconds of a fight scene. What's normal for him is overwhelming for us. So my idea of really getting inside this character's head, for the first time in the series, might have to be scrapped in favor of a smoother narrative. Maybe the rewrite will provide some insight but for now, I'm not sure how well it works. Of course, I could just blaze ahead with whatever idea comes to mind, heedless of any reasonable restraint or justifiable plot devices. In that way, it would be exactly like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.